I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for performing detection and decoding at a receiver in a communication system.
II. Background
A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system employs multiple (T) transmit antennas at a transmitter and multiple (R) receive antennas at a receiver for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the T transmit antennas and the R receive antennas may be decomposed into M spatial channels, where M≦min {T, R}. The M spatial channels may be used to transmit data in a manner to achieve higher overall throughput and/or greater reliability.
The transmitter may encode and transmit M data streams in parallel via the T transmit antennas. The receiver obtains R received symbol streams via the R receive antennas, performs MIMO detection to separate out the M data streams, and performs decoding on the detected symbol streams to recover the transmitted data streams. To achieve optimal performance, the receiver would need to evaluate many hypotheses for all possible sequences of data bits that might have been transmitted based on all of the information available at the receiver. Such an exhaustive search is computationally intensive and is prohibitive for many applications.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to perform detection and decoding with reduced complexity while achieving good performance.